Jenny Delasalle's blog

Month: October 2014

When choosing where to publish a journal article, what signs do you look out for? Here are some questions to ask or aspects to investigate, for clues.

1 – Is it peer reviewed? (Y/N and every nuance in between) See the journal’s website.

2- Who is involved in it? The editor & publisher? Are they well known & well thought of? Who has published articles there already: are these big players in your field? Read the journal!

3- Is it abstracted/indexed by one of the big sources in your field? (The journal’s website should tell you this. Big publishers also offer their own databases of house journals)

4- What happens when you search on Google for an article from the journal? Do you get the article in the top few results? And on GScholar?

5- Does it appear in Web of Science or Scopus journal rankings?

6- Take a look on COPAC: which big research libraries subscribe?

7- have a look at the UK’s published RAE2008 / forthcoming REF2014 data and see if articles from that journal were a part of the evidence submitted, and rated as 4*

8- Do the journal articles have DOIs? This is a really useful feature for promotion of your article, and it will mean that altmetric tools can provide you with evidence of engagement with your article.

9- Is there an open access option? (See SherpaRomeo) This is a requirement of many research funders, but it is also useful for you, when you want to promote your article.

10- Is it on the list of predatory OA journals? You might want to avoid those, although check for yourself. Note that some journals on the list are disputed/defended against the accusation of predation!

12- If you have access through a library subscription, is it listed on Ulrich’s periodicals directory? What does this tell you about it? Note the “peer review” symbol of a striped referee’s shirt: if the shirt is not there, it doesn’t necessarily mean that the journal is not peer reviewed: you may have to investigate further.

FURTHER NUANCES…

– What type of peer review is used? Is it rigorous? Is it useful to you, even if you get rejected?

Like this:

Here are three ways you can invest a little time to save it in the long run, based on things I found were wasting my time:

1) Wake up your computer faster by clearing your desktop! Apparently it helps your computer to boot up faster if you have no documents & only short-cuts on your desktop. Wikihow has lots of tips on how to make your computer run faster, but just keeping files in order and off the desktop is relatively quick and easy to do. In any case, it gives me a lovely sense of order to have very little on my desktop, and tidiness generally saves me time looking for stuff. Or should I really say “organised messiness”?!

2) Back-up phone contacts and only leave the people on your phone who you know you’re going to call. (A quick Google search will reveal how to do this, for your phone.) I used to have at least 20 people under each letter of the alphabet, regularly causing me to waste time scrolling through all those names when searching for the people who I wanted to call! I can always look up old contacts in my back-up, if I really need to.

3) Be efficient with passwords: find a system that works for you! I lose count of the times I’ve had to fill out those “lost password” boxes and then wait for the password to arrive in my inbox. Sometimes, whilst waiting, I got distracted and the link in my inbox timed out and I had to start all over again… now I have a system that works (please forgive me for not sharing it!), it saves me from frustration, as well as time!